India should prepare for a world realigned after the West Asia war

Israel wants to expand through military domination of the region. Iran wishes the same but at this point is likely to be content with regime survival and deterrence.

The Gulf’s Arab states sought to create space for stability and growth by outsourcing security to the US, but have come to realize that they cannot escape the strategic costs of such an arrangement. It is unclear what Trump’s political goals are and how they might affect Washington’s geopolitical interests in the region.

So we cannot predict the course of this increasingly destructive war with any degree of confidence. However, we can already discern trends that indicate that it will lead to a reordering of the world to our west. India must prepare for this potential geopolitical shift.

As Narayan Ramachandran noted in his Mint column a few weeks before the US attacked Iran, fissures within the Trump coalition are highly likely to weaken the power and influence of his administration. The war will accelerate and exacerbate those divisions.

Prominent right-wing figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent have called out Trump for being led by the Israeli lobby to go to war despite it being unclear how it serves America’s own interest.

Many of the technology industry titans who backed Trump are worried about the economic damage that the war has already caused and Vice President J.D. Vance has kept his distance from it.

The issue has split the Democrats too, with the younger lot disapproving of the pro-Israel stance of the party establishment.

Therefore, however the war ends, the US-Israel relationship will not be what it was earlier. Even if Iran were to completely capitulate tomorrow, enough questions have already been raised about how the Israeli government led the US into this war for Washington to continue extending an effective carte blanche to Tel Aviv.

The extent of this divergence depends on military outcomes, the extent of economic damage, its distribution, domestic political developments in the US and the positions of European and Arab countries, especially if international law throws up uncomfortable decisions at inconvenient times.

While it is extremely hard to see Washington become antagonistic to Israel, it can calibrate how much political, diplomatic and military support it is prepared to extend, thereby constraining Israel’s future behaviour.

Israel is also losing the support of important European Union members. Nearly half of the EU countries have now taken positions critical of Israel in some form. Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France and Germany have taken diplomatic and economic actions adverse to Israeli interests.

While EU leaders publicly criticize Iran for bombing energy infrastructure and routes in the Gulf states, it is not lost on European societies that the economic shocks they are suffering are a result of a deliberate US and Israeli choice to start this war. The EU and its member countries are unlikely to distinguish themselves by taking bold positions on their own. They’ll probably follow the US lead on this issue.

This war is a watershed moment for how the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries see their security. They can now calculate the actual benefits and costs of the US security umbrella that covers them.

Despite asymmetry in military technology, Iran has been able to impose severe strategic costs on the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia by exploiting economic asymmetry. Even if most Iranian missiles are intercepted above Arab skies, the psychology underpinning the Gulf’s prosperity has been damaged. And even if, as has been reported, the US did not prioritize Israel’s defence over that of the GCC states, the realization that it might do so is not lost on the region’s elite.

We should therefore expect some strategic reorientation, perhaps through a Gulf-led military alliance that might include Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. The Pakistani military establishment will surely be rubbing its hands in anticipation of the rewards it can secure by offering both military manpower and nuclear weapons.

Many other relationships will come under stress. It is unclear what will happen to the Arab-Israeli rapprochement that America cobbled up, especially if Washington’s own relations with the two sides worsen. West Asia can drive another wedge in the relationship between the EU and the US, especially if a longer war causes severe pain in the lives of ordinary people in Europe. Trump’s taunts and insults will become harder for European leaders to swallow if their economies face crises of Washington’s making.

The upshot is that many of these new alignments are opportunities for India if New Delhi plays it right. It is important to remember that Iran is a potential ally in the Kautilyan calculus. As I argued in my previous column, at this time India’s interests are best served by non-involvement. Let’s Stay Away and Keep Away (SAKA) from foreign wars. Once the warring world solves its simultaneous equations, it will compute that India is a necessary factor in every solution.

The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.